If you can't value IT assets, why should IT be valued?

Mike Simons is the Associate Editor of Computerworld UK and Techworld. He joined IDG in 2006 after almost a decade at Computer Weekly. An award winning IT and business journalist, Mike has a particularly focused on major IT projects and public sector IT. His fascination with the business and social impact of technology began at university, where he obtained an MSc at the Science Policy Research Unit of Sussex University.

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Metrics, return on investment, business alignment, resource management and managing the expectations of your superiors.

These are the obsessions of every CIO, IT director, project manager or team leader. So why is it that a study launched today can reveal that less than half of CIOs and chief financial officers ever try to quantify the financial value of their IT Assets?

The figures, in a survey carried out for Micro Focus, are shocking. Nearly two thirds (60%) do not know the size of their core software assets and one in three admit they do not know what they spend on their software assets.

An enterprise wide ERP system is probably the number one technology investment of a major business (let's ignore the upfront investment in other systems). For most organisations, the ongoing licensing and maintenance costs consume the bulk of their IT budget.

So why can’t anyone account for IT’s value? Is it that there are no suitable metrics? Is it that the CIO really doesn’t care? Is it that most IT systems are still so poor that CIOs daren’t tell the board what is going on?

Is there a conspiracy of silence between the CIO and CFO, between the person who championed the IT investment and the person who signed the cheque? Are both too embarrassed to talk about an inconvenient truth? Or is the survey plain wrong?